"Devil's Dream" by Madison Smartt Bell

Art WinslowSpecial to the Tribune

"Devil's Dream"By Madison Smartt BellPantheon. 335 pages. $26.95

Fiddlers strike up the old tune "Devil’s Dream" more than once in the new Madison Smartt Bell novel that bears its name. It is a sprightly jig, but it turns poignant here, since the blood of the Civil War is pooling around everyone's feet.

Bell has exhumed his protagonist from the pages of history: Nathan Bedford Forrest, the self-made slave trader and plantation owner who raised and outfitted his own cavalry to serve the Confederacy and went on to win a generalship and renown or ignominy, depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line one happened to sit. As one of Bell's characters spots him in "Devil's Dream," true to form, "Forrest was riding out ahead of him still, ahead of them all, standing up straight in the saddle, slashing and screaming defiance and rage."

Forrest, phenomenally successful on the battlefield, was termed a "devil" by William Tecumseh Sherman during the war, and while we might consider the source before agreeing, history leaves other questions on Forrest's character: an apparent massacre of black Union troops occurred in an attack overseen by Forrest at Fort Pillow, on the Mississippi in Tennessee, in April of 1864, for one, and after the war Forrest was a stalwart of the nascent Ku Klux Klan, may have served secretly as its leader, and defended it as "a protective, political, military organization." (The postwar period lies beyond the scope of "Devil's Dream"; Bell clouds the Fort Pillow situation slightly in the novel out of historical necessity, since accounts are contradictory, although survival ratios of white and black Union troops are strongly suggestive of race-based killing.)

How challenging a character for a novelist to render sympathetically, then-- a slaver fiercely bent on defending his way of life. "Have ye ever seen me take a whuppen?" Forrest likes to ask. Consider that Bell spent years rendering Toussaint Louverture, leader of the slave rebellion in Haiti, to be the centerpiece of an outstanding fictional trilogy, and followed it with a biography of Louverture, and one might guess at the appeal of this charismatic Confederate as a kind of opposite. And the social-political settings bear commonalities, even if vastly transfigured: slavery and race hate and war, unspeakable acts, rationales, extremities of will in the protagonists. "The world ain¿¿¿t made accorden to my notions," Forrest tells a mixed-race son of his in the novel, "I just have to live in it. Fight in it. Die in it. No different from you."

Well, maybe a little different, when race is vexed to the point of bloodshed. Forrest's half-black son Matthew fights the Yankees with him, as does a slave from Forrest's plantation who, by working as a teamster, has been promised eventual freedom. Accompanying them as well is a free person of color named Henri, who is gifted with second sight and whose point of view shapes much of "Devil¿¿¿s Dream."

It will emerge that Henri came to the disunited states from Haiti, hoping to start a slave rebellion. A Confederate, told that the former slaves were in charge in Haiti, asked what had happened to the whites. "They died," replied Henri. That sort of novelistic play by Bell — with massacres in Haiti and fears of a slave uprising in the American South the obvious but unmentioned backdrop ¿¿¿ flashes intermittently throughout "Devil¿¿¿s Dream," in scenes that range from the domestic (Forrest at home with his wife, Mary Ann, or in the presence of his slave mistress, Catharine) to the military (running cavalry skirmishes or downtime at camp) to the phantom surreal.

Henri often observes from this phantom surreal, the land of the dead, "the damp misty no-time and no-place of this hilltop," a barren crown where Forrest is not, except in the distance. In one of those scenes, asked by others to tell his story, Henri remarks that the way to tell things is backward, since "There's always something behind the thing you saw before." Bell has organized "Devil¿¿¿s Dream" not in reverse chronology but according to Henri¿¿¿s principle, that there is something behind the thing you saw before. This lends the novel an almost swirling feel as it hops around in time: most chapters are dated, the earliest is from 1845, when Forrest met his wife-to-be, Mary Ann Montgomery, the latest from May 1865, just days after Forrest and his men have surrendered. Some chapters are undated, and at many points in the novel -- or the dream -- Henri is at a loss to say whether an event has happened already or lies in the future. Call it the haze of war.

Forrest's military strategy was ever to "Keep up the skeer" on the enemy, and readers may find parts of "Devil¿¿¿s Dream" throw a skeer into them as well, more of a historical sadness than anything else perhaps, but there. At one point, sharpening his sword in a fashion that he is told is against the rules of war (and which he ignores), he remarks that the world is like a grindstone and advises his son, "Ye may whet yoreself agin it. Or let it grind ye down." Forrest managed to do the former; most others touched by the war had little choice but to accept the latter. You¿¿¿ll see that here.

Art Winslow, former Literary Editor of The Nation, is a frequent contributor to the Tribune.